The Million Uses of Fractal Noise - Page 2


2. The basics

Okay, the fractal noise can be our strong allay, as well as the laughing stock it sometimes is.

Here's some fractal noise in it's default incarnation:

The test area is about 3 meters wide and 2 meters high, and the size of the default noise pattern is one meter.

I changed the texture size to 30 cm in each axis, so we can see the pattern better:

(Hint! 1/10 of the surface area size is a good starting point when sizing the fractal texture)

Here's the fractal noise panel:



Let's look at Frequencies, Contrast and Small Power settings a little closer. When the frequencies setting is reduced to 1, we can see that the pattern seems to consist of evenly spaced "points" with random intensity and some falloff, creating a diamond shaped pattern:

The contrast, as the name suggests, controls the sharpness of that falloff. In the above image, the contrast is set to the default 1, and the below image is 0.5, 1.0, 3.0, 10.0 and 100,0 respectively:

Hint! Multiple offset color layers of 100% contrast one frequency fractal noise create a "cool" camouflage pattern, which is free of the usual stretching artifacts that are present when using image maps!

Hint! You can invert the pattern by giving a negative contrast amount!
 
 

The next one in line is the amount of frequencies. Let's keep the contrast at 100% for clarity, and look at 1,2,3,4 and 5 frequencies:

As can be clearly seen, the more the frequencies, the more the original pattern is broken up. Increasing the amount of frequencies affects the render time, so use as few as possible!

Hint! With 100% contrast multi frequency fractal noise you can create new world maps, which have a resolution that's only limited by the number of the frequencies! ;-)

The next example is with 3 frequencies, and the small strengths of 0, 0.5, 1, 2, and 100:


 

Mmm.. the small power works just as one would suppose, when the strength is small, the pattern keeps the overall shape of the basic frequency, and when it is bigger, the pattern is getting more and more distorted.

Hint! You can texture your zebra with high contrast, y-stretched lotsa small power fractal noise!

This image has a white basic color, a black hicon fractal with small strength of 1, and another fractal layer with otherwise similar settings, but with white color and small strength of 100:

Doesn't look like the normal fractals everyone is used to, does it? Who needs LSD anyway?
 

Next: The 10000000 uses of fractal noise - using layers


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